Tbf Meta saw Google Glass and was like “yeah what if we did it with Ray-Ban tho” and it sold 7 million pairs last year www.wired.com/2013/12/glas...

50% of companies report costs of US AI models as a challenge to adoption. Several are switching to Chinese models. China semis index is up only. Open question if states would be better off if more compute and energy capacity was here

I was at the tile store the other week and a lady was showing the staff her chatgpt designed bathroom I don’t think the tech billionaires forced her to do that lmao

To put this in perspective, the water main for a city near me ruptured. It lost ~20 million gallons before drain-off. Unmet demand for water until fixed (6 days) was 55 million gallons. This was back in December and no one talks about it anymore. I think we’d be fine.

I hate data centers. It’s absolutely awful I can buy a box with dual 25 gbps NICs, and run it in a temp controlled environment, with redundant fiber loops and enough egress that my home ISP would ban me for life It’s terrible, I can use this box to telecommunicate data globally We must stop this

A single one of my shower thoughts is equivalent to a trillion user-years of AI queries in water usage terms

Posting this on a social network that runs on data centers goes so hard

Naval was right

Golf courses aren’t even the largest water consumers

Bsky in the 70s would have been like “what we boiling pools of water for? So you can watch TV and cool fucking beer?” time.com/archive/6845...

Not sure if there is a nation state that heavily benefits from convincing US constituents that their own bandwidth and compute capacity needs to be limited or dramatically reduced but if that was the case it is certainly working

Anyone remember those turtle DSL commercials? I feel like if bsky was around back then they’d be siding with the slowskys. “What do we need a data center for, who needs more bandwidth and lower latency? Who cares about loss of availability?” en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Slo...

It’s not a rebrand. Machine learning is AI. Always has been.

Data center moral panic is the new nuclear energy moral panic

Google's Text-to-Speech API cost $0.00003 per request to use. I may be wrong, but, AFAIK, there is no way with regular dollars to make a payment that small. I believe this only works with stablecoins and I'd otherwise have to may some massive markup to payment providers.

I see this sentiment of “first generation to grow up outsourcing their thinking” often and man as a dad of a toddler I’m just not seeing it. With neurotic millennial parents and AI my son’s generation seems to be intellectually out accelerating ours and totally gobsmacking the boomers.

Modern companies produce so much economic surplus that classical Marxist proletariat are now the bourgeois. We demand from our pocket supercomputers over vast robust telecommunication networks, that those who capture profit change their ops while we lack concern for the surplus we ourselves produce.

Humans, however, invented an ever expanding supply of “bananas.” You cannot hoard these in way that makes them inaccessible to others, because the number on a computer keeps going up. Real bananas are actually closer to wealth than capital in that respect.

There actually was a company that did come into existence without billionaire funding. Their first office desk was a cheap door from Home Depot. It was called Amazon. So many people willingly paid to use their services so often that the guy who started it became a billionaire.

btw the clarity act proposal enables stablecoins to be yield bearing which means banks can't keep profiting off treasury yield while giving you zero or near-zero return for your money banks REALLY hate the clarity act because it allows competition which means they can't gobble up all the excess

One weird trick for getting rid of billionaires: Build better products and services than them that get used by more people. Don’t want Elon to be a billionaire? Tank his stock by building better self-driving electric cars. Tim Cook? Build a better iPhone. Sergey Brin? Build a better a search engine

Idk how people managed to use interactive brokers before LLMs but unironically the UX of tradfi is so many orders of magnitude worse than DeFi that all my equities holdings are onchain now

Oh they scared scared because now there’s a competing RfR yield that will deliver more economic surplus to consumers than the banks do

I agree. My prescriptions should be under $11 billion United States dollars. www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/12/...

We’re in the lowest period of consumer inequality in history. When you use an MRI machine, or peptides, or chatgpt, or buy an iPhone, it’s all the same versions that Bezos uses. There’s no rich person version of OpenClaw. As # of billionaires in the world has increased, so has standards of living.

too many people are starting to become billionaires (low thousands) by creating useful services, we should instead ensure no one does this

No reasonable person opposes data centers. They’re the infra behind nearly every website like this. They make sure your school and hospital websites remain up against 8 terabit ddos attacks. They handle traffic for processing trillions of payments. They’re the backbone of modern civilization.

I can’t believe some people at Amazon don’t even pull in $2m while the average CT seller makes $275k through Amazon

Has anyone built something like this but it uses non-blockchain financial rails? pay.sh

What is the theoretical max one can earn by being world class at sports, or writing Harry Potter, or building a social network, or building online payments, and self-driving electric cars, and rockets that can be caught in midair, and human-computer interfaces that let you play chess with your mind

growth: infra providers (largest you've heard of get major contracts from crypto; internet is improved), applied zk advancements, 24/7 global treasury settlement without credit provision, machine-to-machine payments viability, emerging ownership legal/gov frameworks, real-world asset credit markets

Idk if crypto is the best analogy here… we just saw 175 years old financial services company build on crypto to enable instant global settlement www.westernunion.com/global/en/di... What’s the AI version of this going to be?

Either Wikipedia needs updating or this is not at all correct

Nah this is regressive thinking. We can literally orchestrate agents from our phones now while getting in flow at the skatepark and this person wants you back hunched over your desk just to show performative superiority over using AI

In aggregate, TradFi has had much more money sent in accidental sends than in DeFi

Majority of crypto validators _are_ hosted in cloud data centers. Take like 800 block producing EPYC Turnins, imagine them distributed amongst like 90 data centers. That’s effectively the landscape.

Entry level data center technician for Google makes $100k more than my first tech job

Absolutely dumb take. Btw there’s a game on steam called “data center” where you can simulate working in one. These jobs pay tons. Faang will pay you a lot but it’s generic. If you get more specialized (HFT data centers) the pay goes way higher. Any dem on the wrong side of this is asking to lose.

Don’t get oneshotted by this. Quantummog the planet. github.com/blueshift-gg...

It's a big problem how many people still think of modern LLMs as stochastic parrots.

Thank you @warren.senate.gov

Uh based alert? jacobin.com/2026/04/ai-d...

By this logic the identity of Satoshi is clearly Phil Zimmermann

A lot of people (esp on bsky) think AI is sucking up all the worlds fresh water but almost everywhere you look you'll find millions of user-years worth of AI usage in water terms being spent on innocuous everyday things that people have zero moral panic over (or leaked out of pipes going to nothing)

To his point, we are constantly being updated with new information, and being shown were our old information is wrong, even by the people who gave it to us. E.g. a book that was published with a reference to how much water a city uses (vs a data center) was off by 1000x, the author later found.

Reminds me of one of my favorite movies, Ratatouille, with its criticism of critics.

In Norway your power bill goes up when they remove data centers. www.nrk.no/nordland/dat...

“it’s bad to use AI because then you’re gonna become dependent upon it and have to spend another $10/mo” — sent using a high-speed internet connection that i’m utterly dependent on, provided by AT&T for $80/month